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The H Roundup - Linux Mint 15 RC, WebM patents, Google drops XMPP

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item. This week: Continuous database migration, Google chat drops Jabber compatibility, possible VP8/WebM patent licensing problems, development plans for Ubuntu 13.10, Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 and a ready-to-roll robotics kit from Arduino.

Features

Why not store the data within a database in a version-controlled way in a similar way to how developers store their source code? The H's developer feature this week explains how to do this.

Top News

With the revamp of its Google+ social network and associated applications, Google's chat software is leaving interoperability with the XMPP standard (also known as Jabber) behind. In security news, Bitdefender's Clueful application helps Android users to discover applications that might put their privacy at risk and, at a conference for African activists, researchers discovered malware for the Mac that tries to send screenshots to a server.

Simon Phipps warned that Google's WebM licensing could be incompatible with free software development, a release candidate for Linux Mint was released, and the Handbrake developers announced version 0.9.9 of their media file conversion tool. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu developers have been planning what goes into the next release of their Linux distribution.

Microsoft's Skype division has released a new version of Skype for Linux that polishes the application's user interface, the Debian developers have released an unofficial version of their distribution based on the GNU Hurd kernel, and Arduino has announced a new family of Wi-Fi-enabled boards and a ready-to-roll robotics kit.

Open Source Releases

Open source releases this week included the latest release of the Mageia Linux distribution, a new release of NetBSD, a Perl release, a new version of Google's Chrome browser, and a new Fedora remix targeted at the Raspberry Pi mini-computer.